Category: Motherhood

My friends Denis and Lily are driving me and Tara back home to Limerick from Sligo.Denis has mastered the complex task of threading a seat belt through various safety hooks on the car seat, and so he buckles the baby in while I pack her play mat and nappies.

Though his own children are grown, Denis has saved a full repertoire of songs to charm babies, or at least distract them while a five-point harness clamps their freedom. This morning it’s The Wheels on the Bus. Tara learns that the wheels on the bus go round and round, the doggies on the bus go woof woof woof, and the babies on the bus go wah wah wah. She seems to want to take notes. Maybe in two columns, distinguishing actions from sounds.

It’s true. I’m shameless. I’m known to dawdle past likely admirers—older women, say—while pushing the stroller hood back and blowing bubbles to make her laugh. I collect oohs and ahhs like a busker’s tips.

Because it’s also true that she is gorgeous, this baby. She has liquid Salma Hayek eyes, the kind that go down well in Ireland, where we prize brown eyes over our common blues. She has a healer’s charisma. People feel better when they hold Tara. She waves her fingers in delicate spells, making strangers feel seen and liked without saying a word.

Tara arrived in the air-world with all the qualities needed to succeed at babyhood: a fine, strong body, a well-finished digestive system, and a happy interest in her surroundings. Even before she arrived, I’d known that she was good at being a baby. Our shared placenta was unreliable, so I’d had scan after scan, weekly visits to get to know the beating of her heart, the grace of her swimming, and the way she found her thumb for comfort when the ultrasound technicians poked her.

By six days old, she was smiling every day. By ten weeks, she could roll right over and back again. She sucks with loud, smacking enjoyment—mwahhh!—and smiles herself awake in the mornings. Vaccinations, transatlantic vacations, strangers, teething, the puzzle of a bottle: she accepts all challenges, except the brief catastrophes of her mother’s sneezes.

You can tell, I suppose, how besotted I am, the ridiculous older mother of an only darling. I didn’t expect this child, in any sense. Though my body made her, out of blood and fat and milk and hopes, she is entirely her own self, and those oohs and ahhs are for her, not me. I like that we don’t look much alike. It reminds me that she arrived complete, and I’m just watching her unfurl, and beckoning witnesses to confirm what I can hardly believe. Look at this gorgeous, competent baby. Look, look.

At night I do what once made me good at my work: suck down information about my new research subject, and stack up all the contradicting experts. I’m not looking for advice. Though some things about being a single mother are hard, figuring out how to look after her is easy. These books and podcasts are something else: an orientation. This is what might be going on behind those brown eyes this week. This is what she might be discovering, feeling, thinking. All are clues to my biggest question: Who are you?

That, and of course the baby books give me little hits of smugness that take the edge off, say, figuring out childcare and mortgage payments. For fun, I read out lists of milestones to our neighbor, Keith, who visits her every evening. “Check,” he says. “Check. Ha. Check.” He is even more smug than me that she’s so advanced. We make fun of unknown loser babies who can’t even roll over, for god’s sake. Tara smiles on his lap, judgment-free.

This is the part I can do, these early months, which must surely be the loveliest. It’s all pared down: Breast milk to feed her. Plain water to wipe her bum. My arms to shelter her in bed. A knuckle for sore gums. A song, a walk, a storybook, a swing in the park. We need so little.

It’s the next stage that daunts me, as I leave this trance of babymotherhood to go back into the big world and look for work. I miss having colleagues and business challenges, and I have more to bring them now: my mind is sharper and my heart is bigger and more patient than before. It felt like an exciting luxury to get a few hours of babysitting while I looked for short-term projects this past week. But then the prospect of fifty-hour weeks, traveling for work, and hour-long snarls each way on the Bay Bridge makes me fear for her and for me. This year, I bet on rearing her as a single mother, on moving to California, on buying a home in our hysterical Bay Area housing market while I still could. Now I have to make those bets pay off for both of us.

“There is no such thing as a baby,” D.W. Winnicott said long ago. “If you set out to describe a baby, you will find that you are describing a baby and someone.” I don’t want Tara’s someone to have to abandon her in order to support her. May I find a way to be as good at my part as she is at hers.

Tara and I are in New York. I packed ahead of time to practice managing the car seat, the stroller, a changing bag, and a three-week suitcase. She’s growing while I’m shrinking, and it was a puzzle to figure out what each of us would need in New York’s Indian summer and Ireland’s blustery autumn, multiplied by a daily estimate of up-the-back poos and down-the-back milk, then pared down to the load my back can haul.

This time last year, I had just quit my job in Seattle. I’d originally meant to stay there for two years, and it had been more than four. I felt it was time to come up with a plan for the next half of life. I was a renter. I had no debts and no children, and was prone to being single. And I had a Green Card, at last. That added up to the freedom to go anywhere, and what I wanted was to go where my roots could grow. Whatever tribe and livelihood would bring me joy at fifty, I wanted to point toward now.

So I handed in notice to a company that had been very good to me, and conceived a few notions for a few months off. I would drive across the country to a six-week silent meditation retreat. Then I would go to Zambia, to see where I was born. I might start writing again, to discover what was on my mind. And after that, I’d move either back to Brooklyn or back to San Francisco, and settle in near old friends.

There were a lot of ‘I’s in those plans.

But it turned out that notions weren’t the only things conceived by then. A baby had picked me, for her own private reasons, and apparently, for the rest of my life I’d have company. “A wolf pack of two,” I joked at the time, but I was wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

I’m bound up in an individualistic, transaction-based culture, rising and falling by my own efforts, and I don’t like to need anything from the people I like and love. That membrane of separateness, of self-reliance, is as fragile and illusory as a soap bubble, and a child would pop it instantly.

I was dead right. Independence was an illusion, and she dissolved it long before our shared waters broke. It took me all those months of pregnancy to grasp how babies make the world swell with love, and to learn to rest on that support.

All the baby gear I packed for this trip was infused with friendship. The car seat from Lisa, installed by Gordon. The stroller from Leelila, put together by Devin. The diaper bag from Tricia. The clothes and blankets and burp cloths from a dozen more friends. Our neighbor Keith loaded them all up and drove us to the airport, where he insisted on carrying Tara through security and all the way to the gate. On the other side, our New York friends were waiting to meet her and spoil us more.

Tonight she’s sleeping in Crown Heights, and I’m marveling that it’s a year today since I first learned of her existence. I didn’t know it would be this easy to be us.

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five time more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
—For Brandon and Eliza
Ever Joined in True Love’s Beauty

Beautiful old graveyards address my main complaint about the outdoors: that there’s nothing to read. I’d like more epitaphs, which too few Americans seem to write, but will settle for the barest names, dates, and family labels in this migratory culture, where Hmong mothers lie next to Finnish fathers. Cemeteries makes me wonder about all those lives: short and long, dynastic and solitary, local and far-flung.

In Brooklyn, I used to go to Green-Wood Cemetery to see my compatriots, Dubliner John Mackay, with his heated mausoleum, and the scandalizing Limerickwoman, Lola Montez, dead at 42 and buried decorously as Mrs. Eliza Gilbert.

In Seattle, I lived near the lovely Lake View Cemetery. Another Irishman, P.J. Malone, lies 5,000 miles from his native Mayo, and surely could not have imagined the pilgrims who traipse over his worn 1873 headstone to visit his next-door neighbors, Bruce Lee, who was buried a hundred later, and his son Brandon.

Brandon’s epitaph plays in my mind this season as I make a daily loop of Lake View Cemetery in North Oakland. It’s another beautiful spot, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted with the generosity of a landscape architect who will never see the shapes of his mature plantings. I push my baby’s stroller up the spiraling paths, panting as my softened body tries to harden again. At the top we look down over the San Francisco Bay, south to Silicon Valley, west to Twin Peaks, and north to the Golden Gate Bridge. The Oakland Hills are behind us, with Berkeley to the east.

I take the sunshade down so that Tara can look at the light filtering through the leaves overhead. She squints as she surveys her territory, steering an imaginary convertible with plump arms. Her skin is golden and her eyes darkest brown. She watches her fellow north American natives, the nine wild turkeys who own this hill and the countless Canada geese who gobble the watered grass and then poop more than a ship of babies.

She babbles. We have a little chat about the big birdies.

It occurs to me that she will have an American accent, and that unlike me she will know how to say her name.

(“Is it Taw-ruh or Teaah-rah?” said the obstetrician when I was in heaviest labor, and it dawned on me that there are two distinct American pronunciations, neither of which is my flat Irish “Tah-rah.” Even Siri thinks I say “Tyra,” squashing my hopes that my daughter would have a foolproof Irish name.)

I keep hearing that with motherhood the days are long and the years are short. I don’t find it so, perhaps because I waited so long to meet her. It’s all fast to me. Our days together divide into miniature days that loop quickly. Sleep, eat, blurp, play. Sleep, eat, blurp, play. Walk. Visit friends. And again. And again.

Wherever we are, Tara concentrates on the light, staring at the lamp, the window, the sky, or her Twilight Turtle. The changes help her puzzle out our fruit-fly rhythms. She’s new here, but she’s a great navigator.

I love Brandon Lee’s epitaph. I love the reminder that this immigrant mother and native daughter will have only a certain number of these afternoons at the top of an Oakland hill. Even the act of remembering them will happen only a certain number of times for me, and she won’t record them at all. And yet I look into her face and want to give her every single thing we can see, and all of it seems limitless.

When I was pregnant, Leigh offered me a batch of clothes that her baby, Luna, had outgrown. She warned me to be selective, because hand-me-downs and presents would soon become an oppressive pile of mixed sizes and fiddly buttons. Tired mamas of waddlers would try to offload bags of frilly, poo-stained disasters on rookies like me, just to save a trip to Goodwill. I should take only what I liked and thought I needed.

But they made me greedy, those tiny striped union suits, rompers, and footie-pajamas; and the shoes, of course, the shoes: satin Mary Janes, red patent t-bars, glove-soft white ankle-straps, dove-gray booties. Pregnancy is a work of fiction, and these costumes brought my little character to life. I scooped up most of the clothes and all the shoes, six pairs, which Luna had never worn. We live in Oakland, where the babies dress down too.

In the late nights of late pregnancy, alone in my new house, I laid out outfits for Baby Tara. I cupped those tiny shoes and talked to her while she kicked corners into my round belly.

Tara arrived on her due date, eight pounds and 12 ounces of bright-eyed Californian confidence. The nurse who recorded her arrival had to reposition her feet three times to get them to fit within the borders of the footprints box. Her toes were elaborately knuckled and prehensile, and it has taken a few months of committed eating for her thigh rolls to balance those lovely flippers.

She’s three months old now, and likes to practice standing on my thighs. She stands wide-legged and reels slightly, like a stuntman on two horses, but she holds her head high. Her feet are grippy and strong, and I haven’t had the heart to stuff them into shoes, or to bundle her into pretty dresses that bind her as she rolls over on her mat. I thought I’d keep the shoes and dresses for special occasions.

It took me days to notice she had outgrown her diapers. The onesies for six-month-olds are only slightly baggy, and I’ve been micro-mourning some favorite outfits that I realize she’s already worn for the last time. She grows inexorably, glugging milk all day and stretching and plumping overnight. According to her last weigh-in at the doctor’s office, her mother’s ego is in the 97th percentile. Here in the Bay Area we quantify the self.

Late Friday night I pulled out those shoes, thinking we might dress up for the holiday weekend. I touched the red Mary Janes to her purple-pink soles, and realized it was too late. Only if I chewed off those toes–a real temptation–would they ever come close to fitting.

Now I have my own set of baby shoes, never worn, to pass along to the next baby in our tribe. And I’ve discovered that Papa Hemingway’s shortest story might be more joyful than poignant.